The Cato Institute is committed to being a libertarian think tank: individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace. But one thing that’s often misunderstood is that Cato as such does not take institutional positions on particular policy questions. Cato scholars speak for themselves and have the freedom to reach their own conclusions, particularly on things that are contested among libertarians.


Recently there was an example of this as two Cato scholars appeared in major media to articulate their differing views on vaccines and how to apply libertarian principles in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. One of our senior fellows, Todd Zywicki, wrote in the Wall Street Journal on August 6 to explain why he is suing George Mason University, where he is a law professor, over their policy requiring COVID-19 vaccination. In particular, he objects to the application of the policy to people like him who have already had and recovered from COVID, and thus already have some degree of natural immunity.


Another Cato adjunct scholar, also a George Mason law professor, Ilya Somin, appeared on MSNBC on August 11 to discuss why he sees vaccine requirements as potentially justified and preferable to other policy options. Drawing on libertarian principles, he made the case that a disease like COVID involves the potential of harm to other people. Somin pointed out that mask mandates, lockdowns, and restrictions on international travel are all much more intrusive than the relatively slight imposition of a safe and effective vaccine. There is a particularly strong libertarian case that private institutions, and even the government when acting as employer, can set policies attached to what are voluntary relationships: employees, customers, students, and the like. Florida’s recent attempt to ban private businesses such as cruise lines from adopting vaccine requirements has already suffered defeat in court and is one example of an affront to libertarian sensibilities.


In this case as on other issues, we don’t require uniformity or suppress differing views among our scholars. And any one scholar’s individual view is not necessarily “Cato’s position” on a matter. That diversity of viewpoints and intellectual freedom is part of why Cato has been able to provide an effective voice for classical liberal and libertarian ideas across the entire range of public policy issues. The standards we uphold are for intellectual rigor and solid grounding in good data, especially for work Cato publishes. Our scholars also frequently write, publish, and engage in advocacy outside of Cato, which we happily encourage. It’s that reputation for intellectual honesty and serious engagement with opposing points of view which has helped put Cato routinely near the top of rankings of America’s most influential think tanks, making a difference for freedom in state capitals, on Capitol Hill, and at the Supreme Court, where Cato’s renowned amicus program is tied with the ACLU at the top of the rankings for filing on the winning side of major policy cases.

Over just the last 24 hours, I have seen several videos of rage and recrimination at school board meetings, including a mob screaming at and threatening people who had just testified for mask mandates in Williamson County, Tennessee (video below) and this meltdown in North Penn, Pennsylvania. These painful videos join this June brouhaha in Loudoun County, VA, and many other anger-soaked meetings over the last year or so.

It is hard to watch these often-incensed exchanges and be anything but saddened at neighbor pitted against neighbor.

Recently, Robert Pondiscio at the American Enterprise Institute has been highly critical of something I emphasize about school choice: it offers more peaceful coexistence among diverse people than does public schooling. Instead of forcing one answer on everyone, which is the crux of the wrenching scenes we see playing out across the country, choice enables people to pursue what they think is right – masking or no masking, critical race theory or no critical race theory – without having to impose it on, or deny it to, those who disagree.

In a piece last week, Pondiscio framed this argument as saying “public education sucks,” and even wrote, oddly, that the message seems to be pulled “from a mob movie: ‘You’ve got a nice family. It’d be a shame if anything were to happen to ‘em.’”

Part of Pondiscio’s complaint is that saying people should be able to avoid imposition of ideas they find unacceptable is basically the only argument choice advocates like me make, and that it is an unsatisfying—or maybe just too pacifistic?—retreat from societal debates. Whether Pondiscio is concerned about pacifism is unclear because he both laments people going to their “side of the river,” but also “hoping the other guy stays on his.” Is the problem disengagement itself, or that other people will keep trying to force things on you whether you like it or not, so your only real choice is to stay in the war and vanquish them?

Pondiscio is wrong that choice-as-peacemaker is the only argument people like me make for school choice. He apparently has not read School Choice Myths, edited by me and Corey DeAngelis, which offers all sorts of arguments for choice, including that it creates better citizens, empowers families of children with disabilities, helps taxpayers, and as my own chapter discusses, holds the key to building lasting togetherness. He also might have missed my post from January about the power of choice to provide more progressive schools, not to mention my writing on choice as key to equality under the law.

That said, Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom has long run the Public Schooling Battle Map, to which Pondiscio gives a nice shout-out, and I have certainly emphasized choice-as-peacemaker over the last several months. But the recent emphasis is because our public schooling battles have reached a fever pitch over the last year or so, including over critical race theory, transgender student athletes, and, most recently, mask mandates.

When there is war, it is natural for at least some people to focus on avenues for peace…thankfully.

Of course, nothing about school choice says if you get it you have to be silent about things you do not like. No one requires that you have kids enrolled in public schools to join a protest, write letters to the editor, or just share political opinions with your neighbors. Heck, you can even join Twitter without having public school kids!

What choice does is lower the stakes on intensely personal and controversial issues because, unlike public schooling, it is not winner-take-all. Indeed, the stakes on something like mask mandates, in which schools either require all kids to wear masks or not—they cannot do both—can be seen as nothing less than children’s lives. As a school board member in Norman, Oklahoma, said a few nights ago as she pleaded to implement a mask mandate in violation of state law, “It’s just not okay for kids to commit murder for coming to school without a mask.”

Notably, many countries have implemented choice for peace, allowing people to select schools in order to defuse sometimes centuries of religious, social, and political warfare. And it has frequently worked.

Peace is not the only argument I or anyone else makes for school choice – indeed, peace stems from liberty, which is the ultimate value I argue for – but peace is important, especially now, and I will not stop pushing for it.

Related Event

Peace through School Choice: Examining the Evidence

March 22, 2022 • 12 - 1:30 PM EDT

Public schooling, by forcing people with diverse values and needs to fund a single system of government schools, inevitably produces conflict. Such conflict has reached a fever pitch over the last several years, with Americans battling over critical race theory, LGBTQ issues, COVID-19 masking, and more. Logically, school choice would defuse such conflict, enabling diverse people to choose what they think is best rather than having to fight for control of a single system. But is there evidence of that working? If so, where? And how does that not lead to Balkanization?

Event Details

On Tuesday, after prodding from congressional Democrats and with the Biden administration’s blessing, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced a “temporary” moratorium on evictions of “any tenant, lessee, or resident of a residential property” for nonpayment of rent from circumstances related to the COVID pandemic. A previous nationwide moratorium that was implemented by Congress and repeatedly extended by the CDC expired at the end of July, after the U.S. Supreme Court indicated the agency did not have authority to make the extensions. The new moratorium would likewise seem to fail constitutional muster, though the CDC might argue that it’s different because it only applies to “counties with heightened levels of community transmission” (a category that currently encompasses most of the United States). Besides, the CDC says, the moratorium is necessary to protect public health amidst the pandemic.

This got me to thinking about Scooby Doo.

If you’ve seen the classic 1970s-vintage Scooby Doo cartoons, you know the plot: Scooby and the rest of Mystery Inc. come across a series of seemingly supernatural events and, after investigating, find they’re just cover for some very human scheme. And the schemers would have gotten away with it, too, if not for those meddling kids!

So, what’s the Mystery of the Eviction Moratorium? For believers in the romantic, public interest notion of government, benevolent and expert policymakers use careful research and legal reasoning to craft and implement government interventions that improve social welfare. The CDC moratorium seemingly exemplifies this: setting out tenants in a pandemic would increase their risk of infection, which would hurt public health.

But investigating the moratorium reveals some mysteries:

• Landlords only expel tenants if there are prospective (paying) tenants to move into the vacated units. If the original tenants are at heightened risk of COVID from losing their housing, aren’t the prospective tenants also at heightened risk if they don’t find housing? On net, there seems to be the same risk with or without the CDC policy. The moratorium only changes who bears that risk: the original tenants or the new ones.
• Perhaps what worries the CDC is that the evicted tenants could become homeless and either live on the streets or else take group accommodations in a shelter or multi-family private home. That’s troubling, to be sure, especially in a pandemic. But what of the new tenants? They could currently be in a shelter, a multi-family home, or living in a car. Aren’t they at heightened risk of infection unless they get housing? Again, the moratorium only changes who bears the risk rather than reducing the risk.
• It can be argued that, yes, the CDC’s moratorium only changes the risk-bearer, but moving itself increases the risk of infection. Both the outgoing and incoming tenants must move their possessions, and the outgoing tenants must arrange for new accommodations. But housing changes have been occurring throughout the pandemic: the United States is experiencing a housing market boom. Yet, the CDC has placed no moratorium on the buying and selling of homes or on renters voluntarily changing their housing. Wouldn’t these housing changes also create heightened risk of infection?
• Congress has appropriated $46.5 billion to subsidize rent for tenants hurt by the COVID emergency, yet little of that money has been distributed by state and local governments and nonprofits. Instead of another moratorium, shouldn’t the Biden administration focus on removing the government roadblocks obstructing this aid?
• Finally, the CDC and the Biden administration know about the Supreme Court’s position. The Court did decline to issue an order ending the previous CDC extension, but only because it was set to expire. So why would the Biden administration and CDC set up a clash with the Supreme Court?

We can solve these mysteries using public choice theory, the notion that government policymakers are motivated by private incentives just like everyone else. The Biden administration knows that the new moratorium will earn the gratitude of a clearly defined political group: renters. And the policy probably won’t engender much opposition from a less defined group: prospective tenants, even though they will likely end up paying more for accommodations as a result (putting them at risk of future eviction, in which case they will be part of the renters’ political group).

The administration also knows that trying, instead, to get the rent subsidies flowing will take time and likely ruffle public employee unions, an important Democratic constituency. And the administration knows the new moratorium will play well to progressives, who contribute votes and campaign funds to Democratic politicians, but who aren’t fully enamored with President Biden’s center-left policies.

Next to those private benefits, why care that the moratorium is an insignificant public health measure that could set off a constitutional clash?

To be sure, evicted families suffer an excruciating ordeal. But nonpayment is lousy for landlords, who have their own bills to pay. And prospective tenants benefit greatly from newly available housing. Under the public interest theory of government, it’s a mystery why policymakers would implement an eviction moratorium.

But thanks to public choice theory, the Mystery of the Eviction Moratorium isn’t a mystery at all. If only there were some meddling kids to bring it to light.

Since our last update post in April 2021, Cato’s COVID-19 Permanent Private School Closures tracker has been rather quiet, with only eight total closures in the past three months, of which just four were explicitly linked to the pandemic’s effects.

Is no news good news?

There are certainly some encouraging signs that private schools have made it through the worst of COVID-19. That said, the pandemic’s effect on lower-income private schools, as well as uncertainty about the Delta variant as we enter the new school year, could temper one’s optimism.

The recent dearth of closure announcements may indicate that most of the schools in dire financial straits have already announced their folding. As you can see in the chart below, the vast majority of closure announcements came during the initial shock and uncertainty of the pandemic’s arrival, basically April through August 2020. There was a smaller wave early in 2021, perhaps as schools’ budgets revealed whether they could reasonably open for the 2021–22 school year. And since? Not much.

Many private schools may have stood pat on enrollment last year, or at least withstood enrollment declines. And some saw increases as the year went on.

For the coming school year, some – maybe many – private schools could be looking at increased enrollment. Our survey last year found that roughly a third of schools increased their K‑12 numbers between the 2019–20 school year and the start of the 2020–21, and a recent Forbes headline suggests that the pandemic may have “boosted private school enrollment forever.” Also, a few institutions, like Trenton Catholic Academy in New Jersey, have rallied to reverse closure announcements. Dissatisfaction with public schools, combined with the rapid increase of school choice options, could allow even more students to access private schooling.

Of course, not all private schools are on equal financial footing. As a previous post noted, the average tuition of schools on our closure list is below the national average. Families who can afford more expensive private schools may be able to sustain schools in higher income areas, but lower income families may not have as much freedom. Over half of our closures happened in areas with a median family income below the national average, including the four most recent.

The economic effects of COVID have disproportionately hurt those with less income, and private schools are no exception.

And all private schools may face more COVID-19 headwinds. As the Delta variant spreads, schools face, as an Education Week article put it, “a tangle of state or district rules, legal questions, and community pushback.” While many policies focus on public schools, there can be overlap. For example, an executive order on mask mandates like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ may or may not apply to private schools, depending on legal interpretations. That said, there is no indication that private schools will face a similar closure situation to 2020, and the 9^th Circuit’s recent ruling in Brach v. Newsom may bolster the ability for private schools to remain open.

Ultimately, no news is good news when you are running a private school closure tracker. It strongly suggests that non-governmental education is weathering the COVID-19 storm.

COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths are rising in the United States as the highly infectious Delta variant of the SARS-CoV‑2 virus has become the dominant strain in the country. These serious cases are almost entirely limited to people who are not vaccinated against the virus; for the vaccinated, infection rates are much lower and nearly all infections are no more troublesome than a cold or — at worst – a bout of the flu, and often go unnoticed altogether.

COVID-19 caused at least 11 percent of all U.S. deaths in 2020, making it the third leading cause of death, behind only heart disease and cancer. So far in 2021, COVID has killed more than 200,000 more Americans, meaning it will be a top killer this year too. Yet, about a third of American adults haven’t gotten vaccinated against the virus. This is beyond baffling; if there were a highly effective, very-low-risk, zero-out-of-pocket-cost medication against becoming seriously ill or dying of cancer (and that also lessens your family’s risk of getting cancer), you’d take it, right?

For many of the unvaccinated, refusal to get inoculated is linked to political, religious, and racial identity. Some also say they don’t want the shot because it is “experimental,” a justification that has been defended by politicians and TV talking heads. A recent survey of unvaccinated Americans found that 30 percent said they would be more willing to get immunized if the vaccines were fully approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Many anti-vaxxers argue that government efforts to get people to take an experimental medication are big government run amuck.

Thing is, in saying the vaccines are “experimental,” these people are relying on big government to justify their going unvaccinated.

To date, nearly 350 million doses of the Pfizer/​BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines have been administered in the United States, and hundreds of millions more have been given worldwide, in a drive that has been ongoing for more than half a year. For all intents and purposes, these medications stopped being experimental a long time ago.

All intents and purposes save one, that is. The vaccines, like all medicines introduced in the United States since early in the 20th century, are available only by permission of the U.S. government. Ordinarily, the FDA only approves a medication after extensive testing to show its safety and effectiveness. The agency has long been criticized for requiring far more testing than is reasonable, thereby delaying the introduction of beneficial drugs to the U.S. market. Currently, the FDA is allowing the SARS-CoV‑2 vaccines only under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), meaning they haven’t received the agency’s full blessing. Given the national COVID emergency and early data indicating the medicines’ high degree of safety and effectiveness, the FDA decided to allow their administration. (Worth noting: the FDA is keeping other SARS-CoV‑2 vaccines off the U.S. market despite evidence of their safety and efficacy.)

Put simply, the vaccines are not experimental; they just don’t have the government’s full approval. And the FDA is notorious for its risk-aversion in granting approvals. To receive the agency’s blessing, a medication must undergo three phases of agency-reviewed testing. Roughly speaking, Phase I focuses on the product’s safety, Phase II examines its effectiveness in treating its targeted medical condition, and Phase III studies its effects in the presence of complicating factors. The three available vaccines had each completed Phases I and II and were well into Phase III with great results when they were granted EUA. Since then, plenty more data have been collected showing the medicines’ safety and effectiveness. Pfizer/​BioNTech began the application process for full approval back on May 7 and completed it in June; Moderna started the process on June 1 and should complete it soon. J&J is expected to begin the process in the coming weeks. Yet the FDA probably won’t grant approval to Pfizer/​BioNTech until September at the earliest and could drag it out to early next year. Meanwhile, COVID goes merrily on.

So, yes, the anti-vaxxers are right that the SARS-CoV‑2 vaccines do not have full FDA approval. But when they use that justification, they’re just relying on the foot-dragging and risk-aversion of a federal agency and ignoring the ample evidence of COVID-19’s danger and the safety and efficacy of the vaccines.

Meanwhile, the government has doled out all sorts of benefits because of the COVID emergency, from helicopter money, to enhanced unemployment benefits, to blocking housing foreclosures and evictions. Yet there are plenty of open jobs around the country. Perhaps these assistance efforts were needed in the first year of the emergency, but it’s difficult to justify continuing them when safe and effective vaccines against the virus are readily available. With rare exceptions for people with medical conditions that prevent them from being inoculated, those who are avoiding immunization should not receive government COVID benefits. And they shouldn’t justify themselves by using the government to claim the vaccines are experimental. Their doing so is as big-government as it gets.

President Biden, his wife Jill, and members of his administration are hitting the road, trying to persuade more Americans to get vaccinated against the coronavirus.

That effort is needed: Less than two-thirds of Americans age 12 and older have received a dose of the available vaccines, and only a little more than half are fully vaccinated. Yet vaccinations have tapered off significantly over the last two months, despite ample supplies of vaccine at zero price to recipients. It will take a major push for the United States to reach the 70% vaccination rate that hopefully will yield “herd immunity” and starve out the virus variants that are now circulating–including the new Delta variant that seems especially dangerous and could spread through the country like wildfire this fall.

Question is, will the Biden administration vaccination push do much good? Vaccination rates are tied to people’s politics, as those living in “red” states (that is, states that went to Donald Trump in the 2020 election) are less likely to get vaccinated than people in “blue” states. It’s doubtful that red-staters will become inclined to roll up their sleeves if (as the New York Times colorfully put it) Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden’s high-profile adviser on the virus, knocked on their door.

Fauci recently focused on a more promising audience, “a predominately African American neighborhood in Washington,” according to the NYT. That makes sense; along with Trump voters, one of the most noteworthy groups with low vaccination rates is African Americans. 

Still, what of red-staters? Their low vaccination rates allow the coronavirus to continue circulating and spawn variants, which will extend the pandemic in red and blue America alike. What the Biden administration needs is some “red team” champions to advocate vaccination among Trump voters.

This type of strategy was shown to work last year by Dr. Deborah Birx, who led the Trump administration’s coronavirus response. In the cover story for the new issue of Regulation, Kenyon College economist David Harrington demonstrates that facemask wearing increased in red states following visits by Birx, who spent much of the year hopscotching across the country encouraging people to take steps to avoid the virus. (Her efforts did not increase mask-wearing in blue states, but they were already wearing masks at a higher rate than red states.) Harrington estimates that in four states alone, her messaging helped save tens of thousands of lives.

His findings are especially provocative because Birx has been chastised for remaining in the administration instead of publicly breaking with Trump over his handling of the pandemic. Because she stayed with Trump, she was positioned to promote virus mitigation measures to people who especially needed to hear that message.

Those people need a similar message today about COVID vaccination. Hopefully, the Biden administration will not ignore that need, and find some red-team champions to deliver it.

I’ve written previously about the unhelpful state of public discussion around what are misleadingly dubbed “vaccine passports”—a discussion that tends to conflate Orwellian visions of immunization papers being demanded at every pub and corner bodega with the far more plausible scenario: a few categories of businesses exercising their freedom of association when they deem it necessary, given their specific circumstances, to operate safely.

One example I offered was cruise lines, because several had already announced their intention to restart operation for fully vaccinated passengers, and also because it seemed like such a clear-cut case where such a restriction would be eminently justifiable. Yet Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has pushed one of the most extreme “vaccine passport” bans, is insisting that the ailing cruise lines sailing from his state may not require passengers to be vaccinated before boarding, threatening hefty fines against companies that request proof of vaccination. 

This is objectionable on general principle, insofar as business owners should generally be free to make their own judgments about who they want to allow on their property. There are, of course, well-known exceptions, designed to remedy exceptional wrongs embedded in our history: “Public accommodations” cannot lawfully deny service on the basis of certain “immutable characteristics” like race and gender. But analogizing “discrimination” based on the choice to become immunized against a lethal virus with racial discrimination is both obtuse and at least faintly offensive. Declining to be vaccinated—which is certainly every individual’s right—no more confers membership in a “protected class” than “declining to wear pants” or “declining to pay the ticket price.” 

Florida’s policy is even more foolish when applied to cruise lines specifically, however, because there are, for the foreseeable future, extremely compelling reasons to want vessels to sail with fully-immunized passengers, even if one is unmoved by business owners’ general right to free association. 

Cruise ships typically have an infirmary with at least one licensed physician and a handful of registered nurses on staff to deal with the inevitable medical issues that arise among any large group of people at sea. But they are ill-equipped to deal with scenarios in which dozens or hundreds of passengers become seriously ill simultaneously. An outbreak onboard effectively means the cruise is over for vaccinated and unvaccinated passengers alike. Recall the early-pandemic outbreaks on ships like the now-infamous Diamond Princess, which in addition to being terrifying and harmful to the passengers, were a ruinous public relations debacle no industry wants to risk. 

Cruises also, of course, routinely stop in other countries, many of which have substantially lower vaccination rates than the United States, and are eager to revive their devastated tourism industries without imposing further risk on their own populations. In practice, barring cruise lines from asking about vaccination status will likely mean a lot more unpleasant and wholly unnecessary COVID tests as a substitute. 

Little wonder, then, that a poll run by the consumer website CruiseCritic found a large majority of regular cruise goers—80 percent—would rather sail on ships with vaccination requirements. 

In order to pander to a rabidly anti-vaccine portion of his base, DeSantis has opted for a policy that the cruise lines don’t want, that the cruise passengers don’t want, that impinges on freedom of association, and is jaw-droppingly feckless from a public health perspective.